Book author: Margaret Atwood

Alongside many, I was eagerly awaiting The Testaments. I had it on pre-order and dragged it from the packaging with delight. How was Margaret Atwood going to take The Handmaid’s Tale further? Would it reference the television programme that extended the original novel? What more could be said by June?

Once again, Margaret Atwood showed what a fantastic storyteller she is by choosing a story that could be read on many levels. You could read The Testaments without reading The Handmaid’s Tale; I suspect it would stand as a novel on its own. Similarly you could definitely read The Testaments without having seen the television series. However, there is a greater richness to the story when you can hold them all together. There is something very interesting about this idea of using multiple media to expand and enhance a world. It is not new, of course, but it does provoke interesting opportunities for the writer whose skills are pushed in new directions. It can’t have been possible to write this novel in isolation from the response to the original novel and then the television series. How do you write something new on a subject so many see themselves as being experts in? Continue reading The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

MaddAddam is the final book in Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction trilogy and though it contained some pleasing new developments – Pigoons, the pigs spliced with human DNA, talk through the Crakers and make peace with humans; humans can successfully mate with Crakers; Crakers learn to write and tell their own stories – the novel allowed me to pinpoint my disappointment in The Year of the Flood by once again mostly going back rather than further in time. My hankering was for more knowledge of what might be and how the new world might be forged, rather than for more knowledge of how the key players in the post-viral world ended up in the Craker story.

Even though Jimmy is revived, I missed his voice. He becomes nothing more than a bit part in the story – he is almost a mythic figure in MaddAddam even when alive. First Toby and then Blackbeard, a Craker boy, take on his story-telling duties, making the joint creation story of the new world. This emphasis on the stories of the Craker world is probably why the book goes backwards rather than forwards. It is as if we are reading the beginning of a new Genesis, something Crake himself would have wanted to avoid. We are given all the important details of the making of the Craker world, though the ends of Jimmy and Toby and Zeb are shrouded in Craker-speak. But I don’t want to look back, mostly because the previous two books have made it clear what sort of stories will be found in looking back. I am now so versed in the lives of those significantly entwined with Crake, from the second and third books of the trilogy, that there are few secrets remaining in the past. No, I want to look forward and the book really only hints at that – suggesting a future in which Craker-human hybrids could recreate the unenvironmental and bloody mess of our current human climate. Already Pigoons, humans and Crakers have gone against the Painballers and though they are victorious it is made clear future battles with other bad humans are likely.

But perhaps this morose outlook is my own. I had naively yearned for hope in some human-inhabited future and that which MaddAddam doles out is slender. Though God’s Gardeners would have seen that as no bad thing, I’ve yet to entirely give up on the human race. But it should be noted that whilst the introduction of the written word to the Crakers brings with the promise of mass cultural history, it also brings the likelihood of dogma; it creates a culture and it creates something to fight about. The pen may well be more powerful than the sword – something the Crakers have not yet learnt to use – but the pen may engender the sword. This is an interesting addition to the on-going need for narrative suggested in Oryx and Crake. We need story to make sense of ourselves, but written story, something seemingly unchanging, can be as destructive as it is creative.

Ironically, for a book that speaks mostly of the past, those main characters, Jimmy, Zeb and Toby, not to mention Ren and Amanda, are focussed on only for their past. What happens to them after the battle with the Painballers is mediated through Blackbeard and is therefore incomplete. After three books of getting to know these characters their ends or possible futures are suddenly denied full-bodied description. As a reader who has grown to feel a keen interest in them, this is a disappointment and makes me wonder why Margaret Atwood decided to stop at a trilogy. Why not another book? But then, the point about the human world fading into the background and being remade with the Crakers at the centre suggests perhaps no other ending, as dissatisfying as that might feel.

Ultimately, I sit back from the trilogy and feel a mixture of awe and irritation. Oryx and Crake is the most complete novel of the three. It contains all the idea kernels that unfurl in the following books and it is the most compelling read. The characters and the situations beg further telling and there is more than enough material to invest in two more books but neither lives up to the promise of Oryx and Crake. The responsibilities of forging a new world with the Crakers is never fully explored. I think I had hoped there would be more contemplation of what kind of world those left might want to nurture. Instead there is mostly apathy, or making do, but perhaps that is just realistic. Or perhaps it is in how the second and third novels are delivered: there is more telling, less showing, less room for the inner workings of the mind. Though the story is fleshed out, access into the individual experience of the characters is made more difficult. Perhaps the idea of entering into the thoughts and feelings of a Craker was a direction Margaret Atwood was unwilling to take, but at the end don’t we read for as full an access to others minds as possible? I don’t want to just pick apart the written artifacts of this new Genesis, I want experience it. Jimmy, in Oryx and Crake, allows me to experience, but as the books go on there is more and more intervention of text: the sermons of Adam One in The Year of the Flood and the diary and stories of Toby and Blackbeard in MaddAddam. I miss Jimmy because I miss the feeling that I live in that world. In Oryx and Crake I experience the new world with Jimmy. In the following two novels I am more of a witness as the characters themselves become taken up by baring witness. However inevitable that trajectory, I can’t praise The Year of the Flood or MaddAddam in the way I can Oryx and Crake.

Next week I’ll be reading The Drift by Hester Musson. Please do send in your suggestions for books to read in the coming weeks.

I really enjoyed Oryx and Crake (see previous post) and had high hopes of The Year of the Flood. Oryx and Crake leaves you on the edge of a clearing, as Jimmy stares at the first normal people he has seen since the outbreak of the manmade virus that wiped out, he thought, all of mankind but the Crakers, the super-hybrid men built by his friend Crake. But The Year of the Flood does not take Jimmy’s story much further than an afternoon and we have to wait most of the book to join him at that clearing.

Instead, The Year of the Flood follows Ren and Toby, two women involved in the religious group, The God’s Gardeners and the more violent splinter group, MaddAddam.  Interspersed between Ren and Toby’s stories are worship sessions given by Adam One, the leader of the Gardeners, that always end in hymn singing from the God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook. Everyday in the calendar commemorates a creature, a group of creatures or a saint. The religion is deeply environmental and encourages its followers to recite the names of extinct creatures to keep their memory alive, to avoid eating meat and to prepare for the coming of the waterless flood that will erase most of mankind (who have failed to care for God’s garden) and allow the earth to regenerate.

Most of the characters are linked to Jimmy and Crake in some way and one could see The Year of the Flood as background to their story, for despite enjoying a greater understanding of how Crake’s story unfolded, I was never as taken by either Ren or Toby as I was by Jimmy. Perhaps their preparation for disaster makes them less empathetic? Certainly their less than straightforward belief in God’s Gardeners should make them more empathic. They aren’t crazy, they are people on the run: Ren is a child dragged to the Gardeners from a compound when her mother runs away with a Gardener and is then dragged away again when her mother gets fed up with him; Toby was saved by the Gardeners when they freed her from abusive boss at SecretBurgers, a restaurant chain with a very dubious meat supply. In a way, the Gardeners provides a haven for many who have simply pissed off the corporations in some way, placing its doomsday predictions into a more scientific context – they can see the danger in the corporations attempts to outwit nature: how can you truly control DNA splicing outcomes if God couldn’t control man?

I enjoyed some of the other ideas in the book: the skin suits that sort of stick to your skin and then become breathable, allowing women to dress up in sparkly scales or bird feathers.  Painball, a place where convicts are sent in lieu of a death sentence to fight for their survival is not dissimilar to the arena of The Hunger Games. In the end though, I was reading for the connections, looking for references to Jimmy and Crake, waiting to find out how Jimmy’s story would link up to Ren’s and to Toby’s. This has by no means diminished my eagerness to read MaddAddam however. As with Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood ends on a cliff-hanger. Ren, Toby, Amanda, Jimmy and two painballers sit around a campfire waiting for the singing people, who are marching towards them, to arrive. Are they the Crakers? We assume so given that the assembled characters had to pass through their territory, but they could be another group of people. After all, The Year of the Flood has shown us how many more people survived than Jimmy imagined in Oryx and Crake. Perhaps they are the Gardeners, who we know from Adam One’s sermons, are still alive. I will look forward to finding out next week. So whilst The Year of the Flood doesn’t feel as tight or as thought provoking as Oryx and Crake, it does create a more comprehensive world, one from which the final book in the trilogy will undoubtedly benefit.

After reading MaddAddam next week, I will be moving on to an unpublished novel, The Drift, by Hester Musson. Please do send in suggestions for the following weeks.

Oryx & Crake is a brilliant and compelling read. The protagonist, Snowman, tells us the story of our future and its undoing as the attempt to feed everyone, provide healthcare and satisfy an unending desire for sex and youth, takes us beyond a divided society into a new world where Snowman may be the only normal human left.  Whilst the future world of guarded compounds and an intellectual elite busy playing with our DNA to keep humanity limping along on the earth, is one cartoons have long made our children familiar with, Artwood’s telling emphasizes the darker side of these experiments and the uncaring nature of market forces. But Snowman is not elite. He is a wordsman, useful only for his marketing potential. His life is as barren as any salaryman, until his old best friend from school, Crake, takes him to the richest compound and puts him in charge of marketing his latest products aimed at enhancing sexual prowess while secretly containing birth control elements, or so Crake tells him.  Crake is also working on a top-secret project to reinvent the human race.

Crake’s new breed of men are spliced with various animal DNAs to weed out the potential for violence through eliminating sexual disappointment and therefore ownership. Crake keeps them in a false wooded dome and has Oryx, a woman whom both Crake and Snowman have adored from afar since they were teenagers watching her porn, now a lover to both men, teach the Crakers. Both Crake and Oryx make Snowman promise to look after the Crakers should anything happen to them and of course something, a knock-out virus unsurprisingly developing in areas trialing Crake’s latest product, does happen to the whole world. And then Snowman is left to wander this new empty world with the Crakers doing the only thing he has ever been good at, spinning stories.

It is these stories that make Oryx & Crake different to many other speculative visions of the future. Snowman has always loved language, collecting old, unused words. He understands that words can become obsolete in the face of social change, but a resonance of meaning lingers on in modern versions of the language that left them behind. Narrative is written into the very words we speak and in the face of a world without any but Craker humans, all that Snowman has is narrative. Even the Crakers, hard-wired against hierarchy and violence, can’t be stripped of a desire to know who made them and why and in this need to explain their world they use narrative to rework Snowman’s stories turning Crake and Oryx into mythical, godlike beings and giving Snowman a last laugh: their need for narrative will muddle the waters of the evolution Crake imagined for them.

At the end of the novel, Snowman glimpses three old-fashioned humans through the trees and we are left wondering what will happen, eager to reach out for the next book in the trilogy.

Oryx & Crake is a pleasure to read. It turns a barren future into everyday experience, leaving slithers of hope in a future where most of humanity has rotted with disease. At the end, what do we have left? Stories. That is the only art that holds a dying race together, or builds a new one. I’m looking forward to the next book and will read it after A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra next week, and The Infatuations by Javier Marias the week after.